Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told employees the company is "not too big to fail" despite its recent plans for expansion, according to CNBC.
Mr. Bezos' comment was a response to an employee question about the company's future asked during a November all-hands meeting in Seattle. The employee asked what lessons Mr. Bezos had learned from recent bankruptcies at big retailers, such as Sears.
"Amazon is not too big to fail," Mr. Bezos said in a recording of the meeting reviewed by CNBC. "In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years."
Some employees have expressed concern about Amazon's rapid expansion, according to CNBC. The company's workforce has grown more than 20-fold in the last eight years, and its stock price has more than quadrupled in the last five years.
Amazon, based in Seattle, is also poised to expand into two new headquarters in New York and Virginia, and the company has seen growing adoption of its cloud computing service and its voice assistant Alexa, along with continued success in the e-commerce market.
Mr. Bezos said the key to delaying the company's end is to "obsess over customers."
"If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end," he said, according to CNBC. "We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible."